The University of British Columbia, Vancouver invites applications for a full-time 12-month lecturer position in the Department of Psychology and in Vantage College, the University’s new international program effective July 1, 2015. This position offers the opportunity to pursue teaching at the university level, while engaging in innovative curriculum design and pedagogy in a collaborative teaching and learning community.

While the Lecturer’s academic appointment will be in the Department of Psychology, s/he will be expected to dedicate about 2/3 of teaching and service workload towards the UBC Vantage College program. UBC Vantage College offers first-year curriculum in a cohort learning program to academically strong international students whose English language proficiency does not yet meet the English language requirements for direct admission into UBC. Students take courses in Arts, Science, or, beginning in the 2015-2016 academic year, Engineering or Management before transferring into second year in their degree program. The primary goals of the Vantage College curriculum are (1) to encourage students’ cultural, linguistic, and academic engagement in disciplinary communities and (2) to maximize students’ successful transition to year two in the Faculties of Arts, Science, Applied Science, or Management. The Vantage One program provides sections of Psychology 101, Psychology 102, and Psychology 208. Vantage College instructors work with peers from departments across faculties to develop, implement, and share innovative teaching practices and curricula. In addition, the appointee will teach courses in the Department of Psychology.

Candidates must have a PhD before commencing the position and experience teaching undergraduate courses in Psychology. Experience working with additional language learners or international students is expected. Proven ability and experience working in collaborative team teaching environments is expected. Individuals with strong commitments and demonstrated potential to achieving excellence in teaching and academic supervision of undergraduate students, as well as to making substantial contributions to curriculum development and course design are encouraged to apply. The successful candidate will be expected to maintain an excellent record of teaching and service.

This is a full-time, one-year appointment (non-tenure track), with the possibility of renewal on a yearly basis subject to availability of funds, excellence in performance, and in accordance with University policies. The successful candidate will be expected to carry a teaching load of 24 credits plus service, and to work closely with other members of the instructional team at UBC Vantage College and Psychology. Specifically, the selected candidate will be expected to contribute to curriculum and materials development, collaborate with instructors in both units, and contribute to each unit through service on committees. This position is subject to final budgetary approval; the anticipated start date for the position is July 1, 2015.

The University of British Columbia hires on the basis of merit and is committed to employment equity and diversity within its community. We especially welcome applications from members of visible minority groups, women, Aboriginal persons, persons with disabilities, persons of minority sexual orientations and gender identities, and others with the skills and knowledge to engage productively with diverse communities. We encourage all qualified persons to apply; Canadian citizens and permanent residents of Canada will, however, be given priority.

Applicants should email a single PDF file containing a cover letter, curriculum vitae, a statement of their teaching interests and orientation, and evidence of their teaching abilities and effectiveness (course outlines, student evaluations, etc.) to the following address: employment@vantagecollege.ubc.ca for receipt by March 28, 2015. In addition, applicants should arrange to have at least 3 confidential letters of recommendation e-mailed by the referees to employment@vantagecollege.ubc.ca by the same deadline. Please indicate in the subject line: “Psychology UBC Vantage College 12 Month Lecturer Position.” Enquiries should also be sent to the same e-mail address.

UBC Psychology Senior Instructor Catherine Rawn is developing a course called the Psychology of Social Media, which she will teach as Psyc 325 in January 2016.

This course is currently listed as a developmental course, but will emphasize themes of social and personality psychology. She has already begun brainstorming and you’re invited to participate in this process. If you have ideas or want to see other ideas, check out her Adventures in Teaching and Learning blog.

Catherine Rawn is a faculty member in the Learning Enhancement area of the Department of Psychology. She specializes in teaching and learning and this includes team-based learning methods, the use of clickers in the classroom, student evaluations of teaching, program evaluation of TA Teaching Training, self-control, and social psychology broadly.

]]>http://psych.ubc.ca/ubc-psychology-prof-catherine-rawn-is-using-social-media-to-build-a-course/feed/0Department of Psychology, UBC's photo.cropped-Rawn_Psych_Web.jpgUBC Psychology researchers are among UBC’s Canada Research Chairshttp://psych.ubc.ca/ubc-psychology-canada-research-chairs/
http://psych.ubc.ca/ubc-psychology-canada-research-chairs/#commentsTue, 17 Feb 2015 23:27:16 +0000http://psychology.sites.olt.ubc.ca/?p=6672Call them catalysts, magnets, even disruptors; the federal Canada Research Chair (CRC) program is specifically designed to “attract and retain some of the world’s most accomplished and promising minds.”

Backed by CRC funding, these gifted professors, eminent academics and researchers — the Chairs — ‘set up shop’ in Canadian universities, freed to focus on research excellence and so attract top-notch students and researchers from around the world; the goal being that insights and theories through collective work will translate into tangible realities.

If you Google “How to enhance sexual desire” or “How to spice up your relationship,” you will find a large number of pop psychology and self-help sites will suggest the idea of novelty. Even couples counsellors will recommend these kinds of strategies: “Take salsa dancing” or “Buy new lingerie.” However, there is a lack of research examining the efficacy of this strategy.

Many non-human animal studies suggest that novelty may plan an important role in sexual functioning. This has been frequently demonstrated by the Coolidge effect, where a male will copulate with a female repetitively until he’s satiated and is no longer interested in continuing. But when a new female is introduced, he’s interested again. Although you clearly can’t do this with humans, there are some areas of research that have examined this phenomenon indirectly.

What have you found?

In our recent review of the literature, we found evidence that suggests men and women’s sexual desire declines over time with familiar partners and returns with novel partners. For instance, research on long-term relationships has shown that sexual frequency, sexual satisfaction, and sexual desire decline over time with the same partner. Remarriage has been shown to result in an increase in sexual frequency, therefore this effect cannot simply be attributed to age.

Laboratory studies examining habituation to erotica also support this idea. If you show someone the same erotic clip over and over again, his or her level of arousal decreases. When you show someone a new clip, his or her arousal is renewed. It appears that the Coolidge effect does occur, to some extent, in both men and women.

Is this depressing news for long-term couples?

It may sound depressing, but it can also be empowering. Men and women are choosing, for the most part, to enter monogamous relationships. There are a lot of benefits to these unions with regards to physical and mental health

Heather Morton

as well as monetary benefits.

I think it’s also helpful to know the potential downsides associated with these relationships, so you can create strategies to overcome them. What we’re now in the process of studying is whether couples can reverse the effect of declining desire by increasing novelty within their relationship, such as engaging in a greater variety of leisure activities together or in a wider sexual repertoire.

It can also be helpful to understand that this is natural—that there’s not something wrong with you or your partner. My hope is that we can use this information to benefit long-term relationships. Maybe you can have an affair within your own relationship.

Do you have any tips for couples on Valentine’s Day?

Talk with your partner about exciting activities you may want to try together this Valentines, and new sexual experiences you’d like to have together.

Couples may be able to gain the benefits in sexual functioning that accompany a new partner by introducing novelty in other ways. Previous studies have shown that engaging in exciting activities together increases relationship satisfaction, however the impact on sexual functioning was not examined.

Early results from one of our studies suggest that men and women who engage in a greater variety of sexual activities experience greater sexual desire and satisfaction. It appears as though the frequently given advice on “spicing up your relationship” may in fact be spot on.

Positive relations between youth and their parents can be key to preventing adolescent suicide attempts, according to research from UBC Psychology.

Suicide is the third-leading cause of adolescent death worldwide, and is responsible for a quarter of all adolescent deaths in Canada. The research examines the link between parental bonding – a term describing the quality of a parent-child relationship – and a history of suicidal thoughts and attempts.

Boaz Saffer

Numerous studies suggest that positive parental relationships reduce adolescents’ risk of experiencing depression, loneliness and suicide. “However, it has been unclear whether positive adolescent-parent relations protect against suicidal thoughts, suicide attempts or both,” says Boaz Saffer, the study’s lead author and a graduate student in clinical psychology at UBC. “This is a crucial distinction, given that most people who think about suicide do not act on their thoughts.”

The research used two U.S.-based samples: adolescent psychiatric patients and high school students. Parental bonding was divided into two categories: parental care and parental overprotection. The patients and students completed several questionnaires measuring parental care and overprotection, as well as other known suicide risk factors such as loneliness, emotional distress, and self-worth.

Results indicated that adolescents with a history of suicide attempts reported lower parental care than non-suicidal adolescents and adolescents with a history of suicidal thoughts. The other variables assessed – parental overprotection, loneliness, emotional distress and self-worth – were no different in those who made suicide attempts compared to those who only thought about suicide.

Magicians have astonished audiences for centuries by subtly, yet powerfully, influencing their decisions. But there has been little systematic study of the psychological factors that make magic tricks work.

Now, a team of Canadian researchers has combined the art of conjuring and the science of psychology to demonstrate how certain contextual factors can sway the decisions people make, even though they may feel that they are choosing freely – a finding with potential implications even for daily decision-making.

“We began with a principle of magic that we didn’t fully understand: how magicians influence audiences to choose a particular card without their awareness,” explains Jay Olson, lead author of a new study published in Consciousness and Cognition. “We found that people tend to choose options that are more salient or attention-grabbing, but they don’t know why they chose them,” says Olson, a graduate student in psychiatry in McGill University’s Raz Lab, which investigates psychological phenomena such as attention and consciousness.

The research was conducted in two stages. In the first, Olson (who is also a professional magician) approached 118 people on streets and university campuses and asked them to choose a card by glancing at one as he flipped through a deck of playing cards. The entire riffle took around half a second, but Olson used a technique to make one of the cards — the “target card” — more prominent than the rest. Some 98% of participants chose the target card; but nine in 10 reported feeling they had a free choice. Many concocted explanations for their decisions: one, for example, claimed she chose the target card (the 10 of Hearts) because “hearts are a common symbol and the red stood out.”

In the second stage, the researchers created a simple computer-based version of the riffle by presenting a series of 26 images of cards sequentially on a screen. Researchers asked participants to silently choose a card, then enter it

Dr. Ronald Rensink

after each of 28 different trials. Overall, participants chose the target card on 30% of the trials. Although “reasonably high” this rate was much lower than in the first study, “possibly because many of the social and situational factors central to magic tricks were absent” from the conventional laboratory conditions in which this stage was carried out, says co-author Ronald Rensink, a professor of psychology and computer science at the University of British Columbia. In a magic performance, for instance, spectators may be influenced by the personality of the magician, expectations created by the setup, and pressure to choose a card quickly, he notes.

“Magic provides an unusual lens to examine and unravel behaviour and the processing of higher brain functions,” says co-author Amir Raz, who is a former professional magician and holds the Canada Research Chair in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Attention in McGill’s Faculty of Medicine. “This study joins a nascent wave of experiments that binds the magical arts to the principles of psychological and neural sciences. Such a marriage has the potential to elucidate fundamental aspects of behavioural science as well as advance the art of conjuring.”

Vancouver magician Alym Amlani, an accounting instructor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, B.C., also contributed to the study.

Funding for the research was provided by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

Surrounded by forest and ocean, UBC’s Vancouver campus has no shortage of breathtaking vistas. It was one of these vistas that a sparked an emotional reaction in Dr. Jiaying Zhao, Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at UBC.

When tears sprung to her eyes she realized what she felt was happiness. The scientist in her describes this as having an immediateaffective experience. It was this very reaction that led her to launch Project Happiness, a year-long research project to discover where, when and why people are happiest on UBC’s Vancouver and Okanagan campuses.

“As soon as I arrived at UBC, I was taken aback by the beauty of the Vancouver campus. In my first week I walked around and took in the beauty of the Rose Garden, the beaches, and the mountains,” says Zhao, a recently named Canada Research Chair. “The campus has this powerful force of nature that induced a feeling of awe in me. I was happy and as a scientist I wanted to explore why I felt this way.”

After some research on what might determine a person’s subjective wellbeing – typically factors including your career, income, health and relationships – Zhao realized that the relationship of how our physical environment influences our wellbeing hasn’t been sufficiently explored.

A pin drop

Using a scientific approach she set out to create an interface that would allow the UBC community to plot their happiness in real time. In the online interactive survey participants can indicate how they are currently feeling and their physical location on UBC‘s Vancouver and Okanagan campuses.

“This study will provide a new line of evidence on links between our physical environment and our wellbeing,” says Zhao. “UBC is generally a very happy place, but it does fluctuate around exam time. We’ll be collecting the data over one year to examine the seasonal differences and we’ll be building spatial and temporal well-being maps of UBC.”

The online survey was developed by Structured Reports, a UBC-based startup company that specializes in software, research and data visualization. The company was founded by former UBC graduate students and the development and programming of the interface was primarily done by current UBC undergraduates.

Funded by a Hampton Research Grant, this project has great potential to provide new insights in a range of areas of interest to campus planners, city planners and policy makers.

“We can use this knowledge to guide campus planning – and even urban planning at a larger scale,” says Zhao. “It’s not just about Vancouver or UBC for that matter. It’s about understanding our overall wellbeing.”

Jiaying Zhao is jointly appointed in UBC’s Department of Psychology and Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability. Her work is motivated by the fact that human behaviour is not only governed by internal cognitive processes, but also influenced by a rich set of external, environmental factors.

]]>http://psych.ubc.ca/ubc-psychology-prof-jiaying-zhao-is-exploring-how-your-environment-affects-your-happiness/feed/0JZHappyBadge1Zhao_Thumb_WebDean of Arts Faculty Research Awards: March 15, 2015http://psych.ubc.ca/dean-of-arts-faculty-research-awards-march-15-2015/
http://psych.ubc.ca/dean-of-arts-faculty-research-awards-march-15-2015/#commentsFri, 30 Jan 2015 21:08:13 +0000http://psychology.sites.olt.ubc.ca/?p=6606The Dean of Arts Faculty Research Awards for Assistant, Associate and Full Professors in the Faculty of Arts are to allow research faculty one semester to concentrate entirely on research without teaching or administrative duties.

Anyone who has conducted any form of psychology research (with a faculty supervisor) during the 2014-2015 academic year is encouraged to apply. This is a great opportunity to showcase your hard work, and also gain experience in professional research presentation. The deadline to apply is: February 13th, 2015.